The New Misogynists

Every time I start to feel glad the Democratic Party's inclusiveness allows it to avoid the pitfalls of narrow ideology that are condemning the repugs to irrelevance, some idiotic interest group that claims to be Democratic gets me contemplating the usefulness of party purges.

Blue Dogs are perennial annoyances, of course, but now we've got a bunch of anti-choice misogynists sneaking into our tent and stealing all the booze.

In the anti-abortion movement there is a romantic thread about women and pregnancy that includes the notion of submission alongside of passivity. However difficult the pregnancy or the circumstances of a woman's life might be, the sign of a good woman is that she submits to the cosmic event. The alteration of her identity from self-identified autonomous person to pregnant woman and to mother are conditions she has no control over -- other than to say no to sex.

Francis Kissling goes on to illuminate the four basic assumptions that prove these infiltrators are about as "feminist" as "Democratic" as the Taliban:

• Deny there is any "need" for abortion - just make women stop having them! Problem solved!
• Oppose contraception, the one thing that if made easily available would actually reduce the need for abortions.
• View sex as a religious, rather than a biological, activity.
• Define pregnancy as a "gift" to the sperm donor.
  

No, these people don't see women as receptacles; they see them as incubators. I wonder how many women, if forced to choose between the two, would take the former.

Read the whole thing.

h/t Terri at Barefoot and Progressive.